![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/junkyard-haunted-house_provided-by-hernandez-family-e1790962429658.jpeg\")
\n\t\t\t\t\t\tThe Hernandez family stands in front of one of their transformed haunts at Old City Park. \t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n
\t\t\t\t
\n\t\t\t\t\t\tThe Hernandez family stands in front of one of their transformed haunts at Old City Park. \t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n
Provided by Ricardo Hernandez<\/p>\n
One man\u2019s trash<\/a> is another man\u2019s treasure, and Ricardo Hernandez has built a very successful business on turning garbage into cold, hard cash. The Dallas-based entrepreneur began hauling away unwanted furniture and accessories<\/a> 20 years ago when his father gifted him a van.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cI started posting on Craigslist, then Google came around, and my junk removal business started soaring,\u201d Hernandez recalls. \u201cI was going back and forth picking up people\u2019s junk, and one day\u2026 my friend said, \u2018Hey, with all this junk you\u2019ve got, you should make a haunted house.\u2019 I thought it was the dumbest idea ever.\u201d<\/p>\n But he still took a chance, charging residents in his first location, his warehouse on Sylvan Avenue in Oak Cliff, just five dollars to get in. By the time he hired his sister Maribel as a set designer three years later, Hernandez says he was raking in more than $100,000 for the season.<\/p>\n \u201cI use social media like it\u2019s going out of style,\u201d Hernandez says. \u201cAnd I wasn\u2019t disposing of my trash; I was reusing it. I was double-dipping my business, and I started to see a lot more money in my junk removal because I wasn\u2019t dumping as much.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Sign up for the Arts & Culture newsletter to get the latest stories delivered to your inbox<\/p>\n THANK YOU!<\/p>\n You’re all set.<\/p>\n CLOSE\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n As the middle child in a large, tight-knit family, he has since provided work for his sisters, brother and each of their kids. The Hernandez haunted side hustle keeps growing \u2014 a Fort Worth outpost made its debut on Chester Street in 2024 and was joined this year by a separate \u201cStranger Things\u201d-themed haunt next door. Now, all of their haunted house locations are open every weekend through the end of October. <\/p>\n Hernandez\u2019s ability to re-purpose brown furniture and used mattresses and transform them into smoke-filled mazes and haunted rooms full of freaks and ghouls was a win-win. Each year, he and his crew sit down and come up with a higher concept for the season to keep things fresh. <\/p>\n \u201cWe give my sister a vision and an idea, and she comes up with the craziest ideas ever,\u201d Hernandez says. \u201cSome of them are expensive, and some of them are cheap. I\u2019ll say \u2018I want to do Stranger Things this year,\u2019 and we dial down and have a meeting like a real business. Some of the shit she does I would never do, but it works.\u201d <\/p>\n With a faster pace at the Dallas location, and a slightly slower, storytelling approach in Fort Worth, Hernandez divides sections of his haunts into different scary zones.<\/p>\n \u201cThis year we\u2019re pushing a haunted library; we\u2019re pushing church. We made it rain outdoors last year during the season, and people loved it,\u201d he says.\u00a0<\/p>\n As Hernandez was already killing it with his existing locations, he was looking for a new challenge with a new site when the most exciting haunt to date presented available: Old City Park. The site has sentimental value for Hernandez, as he was married there back when it was called Heritage Village. After some back and forth with the City of Dallas, they agreed on a fair rental fee. <\/p>\n Ironically, the site already had some spooky history. Full of buildings from the 1800s relocated from other sites across the state, Old City Park had an established haunted reputation and used to offer late-night\u00a0Victorian Spectre\u00a0tours<\/a> around Halloween. Since most of the interiors and furniture were auctioned off a few years back, the empty buildings are eerier than ever and ripe for Hernandez to take their history and run with it.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cWhen you go at night, it\u2019s a freak show; it\u2019s scary as fuck,\u201d he laughs. \u201cBut now imagine City Park at night and all the trees lit up with lighting and thunder and the sound system going. Every house is lit up with fog flowing out of them and music playing inside. We decided to put actors inside the buildings, and they\u2019ll tell a story that will scare the shit out of you.\u201d <\/p>\n Hernandez also took inspiration from the history of existing structures at the site. <\/p>\n \u201cThe Renner schoolhouse was moved there (from Carrollton), and we took that idea and came up with the teacher locking the doors and lighting the building on fire. When you step right up, (the host) will push you inside, and that\u2019s when the show happens.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Of the seven haunted house experiences on offer at the site, Hernandez is most excited about the notorious\u00a0Millermore mansion<\/a>, a site so eerie he and his team refuse to work inside at night. He says both he and his sister, Emily, felt an invisible entity tap them on the shoulder while measuring the space for props.\u00a0<\/p>\n With scare zones, lighting and sound effects, Old City Park looks to become the crown jewel in this haunted empire. All of his sites offer free parking and reasonable entry fees ($25 for the original Sylvan site, $40 for the Park and Fort Worth), keeping the scares affordable should help him solidify his role as the reigning King of Halloween.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m proud of providing for my sister, my older sister and my brother, that hits my soul,\u201d Hernandez says. \u201cAnd we want to keep on expanding. We\u2019re 100 percent going to Denton next year. Denton is the capital of Halloween, and we\u2019ll be the number one haunted house in Denton in one year!\u201d![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/IMG_2434-rotated.jpg\")
The Fort Worth location of Junkyard Haunted House was summoning the spirits for last year\u2019s installation. <\/p>\n
<\/a>All three Junkyard Haunted House locations (2700 Sylvan Avenue in Dallas, 2423 Chester Street in Fort Worth and Old City Park at 1515 South Harwood Street) are open from 8 p.m. \u2013 12 a.m. every weekend through Oct. 31. A \u201cGolden Ticket\u201d to cut the line at all three locations can be purchased\u00a0for $100 online<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Hernandez family stands in front of one of their transformed haunts at Old City Park. Provided by…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":454572,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[102,104,103,64,987],"class_list":["post-454571","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-dallas","tag-dallas","tag-dallas-headlines","tag-dallas-news","tag-events","tag-halloween"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/454571","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=454571"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/454571\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/454572"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=454571"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=454571"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=454571"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}